


home is an open book

by snowdarkred



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Books, Families of Choice, Fluff, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-05-15
Updated: 2012-05-15
Packaged: 2017-11-05 10:02:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,045
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/405186
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/snowdarkred/pseuds/snowdarkred
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The front door’s unlocked, and nobody’s home, so Stiles dumps the box of books in the room off of the kitchen and leaves.</p>
            </blockquote>





	home is an open book

**Author's Note:**

> I said I wanted it, so I wrote it. 
> 
> I have very low impulse control.

When Stiles was nine, his mother took him down to San Francisco to see a theatrical production of _Star Wars_ , preformed by art students and random people off the street in a local theater. It was ridiculous and charming, and his mother used it as a weapon to make him read Shakespeare, since half of the production was in iambic pentameter. Together they read through the main plays of Shakespeare, the most famous ones. They do this even as she gets sicker and sicker, and when she’s too weak to read aloud, Stiles takes over, flipping through the pages with trembling fingers and trying to do the voices.

It’s not until after she dies that he realizes she took him down to San Francisco the day after her doctor’s appointment — the day after she found out.

But it’s that goofy production and his subsequent Shakespeare obsession (fueled by _The Lion King_ and how his mom would turn the sound off and force the entire family to make up Elizabethan lines instead) that kindles his love of words. 

Stiles does well in school without particularly trying. He doesn’t study, much, because studying is boring and he has better things to do. He has Amazon open in a tab almost constantly, and the local library’s staff knows him by name and book preferences, and it’s not unusual for him to make rounds around all of Beacon Hills’ used bookstores on the weekends, even the antique ones that really shouldn’t let teenagers in.

He gets an allowance from his dad, as well as a fair bit of change from Mrs. Summers down the street, as payment for taking care of her many cats. He buys enough books that his father converts the downstairs guest room into a private library, complete with IKEA shelves and terrible secondhand furniture. 

After Scott gets bitten in the woods by Derek’s slightly insane werewolf uncle, Stiles has to change where he keeps his books, because apparently his life is a weird paranormal non-romance. 

He buys all of the old and slightly rotting books about the supernatural from the antique dealers, using up his entire savings in the process. He keeps them under his bed for a while, like some guys who don’t live with their widower and all-knowing fathers keep their porn. However, under the bed isn’t the best place for ancient books, so after Peter dies and Derek goes up a level in werewolf, Stiles packs them all in an airtight box and hauls it out to his Jeep.

“Donating?” his father asks over a mug of coffee as Stiles staggers under the weight. It wouldn’t be the first time Stiles has thinned his collection by taking them to the local Good Will or the domestic violence center he’s not supposed to know the location of. Stiles swallows his guilt and gives an affirmative grunt. He’ll dig up some of his children’s books and run them down to the center later. 

Stiles takes the books and drives over to the Hale house, which, thanks to the money Derek produced from who-knows-where-and-please-god-don’t-tell-me, looks like less of a burned out husk and more like an actual home. 

The front door’s unlocked, and nobody’s home, so Stiles dumps the box of books in the room off of the kitchen and leaves. 

Two weeks and one house-sitting job later, Stiles does another round of visits to the antique shops, and then he gets a call from one of the places just outside the county lines. So he makes a day of it and drives over to pick up an English translation of _Benandanti: de goda häxmästarna_ , which is bound to be inaccurate but _hilarious_. 

Stiles takes the new books over to Derek’s house, and the whole pack is already there. No one spares him a look as he stomps in through the front door, new purchases in hand, and goes back to the rest of his books. 

There are some things there that aren’t his: a few Cosmo magazines of Lydia’s that have drifted into the house, no doubt dumped with Stiles’s things out of spite by Derek; some of the required reading Scott’s been avoiding; Jackson’s douchey lacrosse manuals, thrown here after he realized he no longer needed them. Stiles huffs in annoyance, but he can’t just _leave it like this_ , not with Lydia’s Cosmopolitan magazines sitting beside Scott’s _Othello_ , as if the two had any right to be in the _same room_. 

Stiles is a snob; sue him.

No one in the pack comments on it as more and more of Stiles’s supernatural impulse buys take over what really ought to be the dining room.

Eventually, he runs out of local contacts and resources for new paranormal research, so he turns to the internet once again. It makes more sense to have any new tomes or, once, scrolls sent to Derek’s house directly, now that it has a mailbox and an address. His father has been eyeing him suspiciously for a while, and Stiles doesn’t know why. Better to not risk it.

One day, Stiles comes over to Derek’s house — door unlocked, because anyone who breaks into the Hale house is not going to live to regret it, let’s be honest, and the hunters wouldn’t dare invade the pack den — and finds that someone’s put together shelves and messed up his sorting system by putting his books on them. Derek, probably.

It’s as he’s fixing the mess Derek’s made — and really, who puts a Charles Dickens novel next to Margaret Atwood, _honestly_ — that he realizes that his little supernatural library no longer encompasses only the supernatural. A lot of his books from home have found their way here: His copy of _Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban_ , from when he wanted to annoy Derek with questions about Remus Lupin; his signed _American Gods_ ; the Narnia boxset his mom bought him when he was eight and then read to him while doing the character voices. (She refused to read the seventh book to him because of what happened to Susan, and he didn’t read it himself until after she died. He wishes he hadn’t.) 

His library has found itself another home, here in the rebuilt Hale house. And it’s expanded a bit as well. 


End file.
